


Amanda's Story ("Fishing")

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves [81]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Genre: Backstory, Bester's parents were terrible people who did terrible things, Canon Character of Color, Canon Compliant, Female Character of Color, Fix-It, Gen, Kidnapping, Malaysia, POV Character of Color, POV Female Character, Psi Cops, Psi Corps, Rogue Telepaths, Sacrifice, Terrorism, The Corps Was Right, The Psi Corps tag is mine, Unlikely Hero, Violence, Worldbuilding, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-16
Updated: 2017-11-16
Packaged: 2019-02-01 18:56:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12710940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: A Psi Cop realizes that that Geneva can't - or won't - give her the resources she needs to fight terrorism, so she takes matters into her own hands.The prologue ofBehind the Glovesishere- please read!





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> What is this series? Where are the acknowledgements, table of contents and universe timelines? See [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10184558/chapters/22620590).
> 
> If you like _Behind the Gloves_ and would like to send me an email, I can be reached at counterintuitive at protonmail dot com. Do you have questions? Would you like to tell me what you like about this project? Email me!
> 
> I also have an [ask blog](https://behind-the-gloves.tumblr.com/), a [writing blog](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/pallasite-writes), and a "P3 life" Tumblr [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/p3-life) with funny anecdotes. :)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In Dark Genesis, on p. 131, the lead Psi Cop on the mission is described as a "tough-looking black woman." This is her story.

2175\. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

          Amanda Fresno had once believed her promotion to station chief of the Corps' Kuala Lumpur office - the only Psi Corps office in Malaysia - was career advancement. Station chief! Of a major city! Surely that was a compliment to any Psi Cop who had survived two decades of field assignments and lived to the age of forty.

          But now she knew better. It didn't take Amanda long to see that the powers that be in EarthDome truly cared little what happened in most of Southeast Asia. She'd actually been "promoted down" - strategically placed in a mid-level position in the Corps where she could, in reality, do very little. She got minimal cooperation from the local mundane police - she was an African American, widowed, Christian woman in Muslim Malaysia - a telepath and a Psi Cop, appointed to their country by _Geneva_.

          Resentment of EarthDome ran high in these parts. Malaysia, alongside Singapore, had been forced to join the Indonesian Consortium to get nominal representation in the Senate, but Malaysia was not Indonesia, and proudly so.

          Amanda could handle mundanes - she'd spent her career doing that. That wasn't the worst. The worst came from inside the Corps itself.

          For years there had been rumors that Jack O'Hannlon, the Corps' most infamous and wanted terrorist - and the "mastermind" behind decades of bombings, kidnappings and murders - was holed up somewhere in Malaysia. He wasn't spotted very often, but when he emerged, he stuck out - in the towns he passed through, he was the only Irishman around.

          When she'd taken over as station chief, Amanda had poured over the intel, looking for clues as to his whereabouts. It didn't matter what the mundanes thought of her, she figured, and it never had - if she could use her "promotion" to catch O'Hannlon, the Corps would have to respect her.

          Hell, if she she could catch O'Hannlon, she figured, they'd put a statue of her right up next to Karges.

         Her office, however, had little time and resources to spend tracking terrorists, even the most notorious. They were under-staffed, ill-equipped, and terribly over-worked. Over thirty-thousand telepaths lived and worked in Malaysia, and her one office had to handle _everything_ \- their job placements, their benefits, their healthcare, their education, their marriage licenses... _everything_. They had to process and investigate every complaint sent in by mundane corporations about "under-performing" telepaths, true or false. They had to protect telepaths from violent crime and prosecute the normals who hurt them. They had to oversee the operation of a large prison camp and several smaller ones. And they had to rescue young telepaths from normal homes and schools before they were abducted by human traffickers and sold into slavery somewhere on the black market. When a call came in, they had to haul ass _immediately_ \- by chopper if necessary. A few wasted minutes and a child could be in unfathomable danger - telepath children fetched the highest prices in the underground sex slave trade.[1]

          And on top of all this, she had made it her mission to stop terrorism.

          She had, of course, done the logical thing first - she'd asked Geneva for more people, more money, and more equipment. Geneva had said no.

          She had told them about children they'd failed to reach in time, about the six-month backlog in processing marriage applications, about the understaffing at the hospital, about a prison break at one of the smaller facilities where there weren't enough guards and the infrastructure was so poor, the power went out every week. She told them every one of her woes and they told her to pound sand. No money, they said. No staff. Nothing.

          Again and again she made her pleas, but Geneva only gave her the cold shoulder. As a "later," she had no family connections in the Corps, no kinfolk in high positions she could call in for support. The truth finally sank in - Geneva had "promoted" her to an impossible job so she could fail.

          She refused to fail.

          Her staff did their very best - all of her senior staff literally lived in the KL office, and they'd set up cots for junior staff who had to spend nights in the office from time to time. But resentment towards Geneva nonetheless ran very high, and morale ran very low. The Corps was Mother and Father, but few were pleased to be _married to it_ as well.

          It was under these deplorable working conditions that her office, one day, began picking up unusual chatter. O'Hannlon, from his secret holdout somewhere in the country, was sending encrypted messages across the 'nets to his contacts abroad. The messages themselves contained few specifics - O'Hannlon expected, after all, that the Corps would find a way to decrypt the messages, and would read everything - but there were many messages, as many as three, four a day, short and vague. Something was happening. Something big.

          Desperate, she contacted Geneva. She told them about the chatter. She told them that she expected a terrorist attack was imminent. She told them she knew the messages had originated from within Malaysia, and requested the resources to track them down and stop O'Hannlon once and for all.

          Denied.

          "Please," she begged, almost in tears. "He's going to bomb us again. People are going to die unless you let us do our job!"

          The assistant director on the call looked as distressed as she felt, but he wouldn't budge. "I'm sorry," he told her. "I hear you Ms. Fresno, but there is literally nothing I can do. Director Vacit himself says that no more money's to go to the KL station, that it's needed elsewhere."

          "People will die!"

          "I told him that. He won't budge. I can't send you what you ask for. I'll lose my job... or worse."

          It was the most honest, frank and terrifying expression of the truth she had ever heard since she'd entered the Corps at sixteen.

 

[1] See the story of Fatima Cristoban, Gregory Keyes, Deadly Relations, p. 100-104. See also [Talia's grandmother's story](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10867419).


	2. Chapter 2

          At first, Amanda kept the assistant director's words from her colleagues. She didn't know how to tell them. She didn't know _what_ to tell them.

          So she said nothing, and prayed she was wrong about the chatter.

          Three days later, as the afternoon sun baked down through her office window and she filled out yet another damn pile of _paperwork_ , an aide knocked gently on her office door.

          She didn't like that knock. Her stomach dropped. He opened the door, and she looked up at his face - Eric was barely out of school.

          "Yes, Mr. Foo?" she asked, even though she already knew what he was about to say.

          The question bought time. The pause it offered, however brief, gave her a moment to process what he was about to say, and him a moment to put the nightmare into words.

          "They bombed Geneva," he managed. "The school."

          "How bad?"

          "Dozens of casualties... numbers aren't in yet. Teachers, students. The images are just coming in now. They're all over ISN... that is, what they can show on television. The Corps' sending it over unfiltered."

          It took all of Amanda's willpower not to burst out in a string of profanities and start smashing up her own office. She'd known this was coming. She'd seen all the warnings.

          With a chill, she wondered if this had happened before. She'd spent her career out in the field, taking orders as they came in, trusting that the Corps was serious about stopping the terrorists. But now, she had doubts.

          Had this happened before? Had other administrators - high or low - had warnings, but been blocked from acting on them? Had they been prevented from chasing the "big fish," and forced to chase only the small?

          It was too horrible to contemplate. O'Hannlon and his associates had killed so many of her colleagues over the years. _Brothers, sisters._ Had their deaths been for nothing?

          The director was a mundane, as the charter required. If O'Hannlon's primary targets had been normals, she mused darkly, would he have shut the terrorists down years ago? Why the hell was O'Hannlon's network still operating - because his victims were "only teeps"? The thought made her sick.

          Had Vacit actually been blocking Psi Cops all along, on levels she couldn't see from the field? Normals ran far more sophisticated terror networks than O'Hannlon's, even on Earth - such as the cell that had nuked San Diego into a radioactive wasteland[1] \- and normal police forces all across the globe had teamed up to combat their forces of evil. O'Hannlon's organization was small, but they only targeted telepaths.

          Ruthlessly.          

          "Thank you, Mr. Foo," was all she said aloud, and he closed the door.

          The images on the news were every bit as bad as her young aide had said - even worse. Rogue telepaths had infiltrated the school campus under cover of night and placed C-4 explosive on the outer walls of one of the main buildings of the Minor Academy, then had remotely detonated the explosives in the morning, when students and teachers had arrived for class. The whole building had collapsed. Survivors - covered in dust, dirt and blood - were pulled from the rubble. A old man without hands was carried off on a stretcher. A woman lay among the debris, her legs twisted into unnatural positions, bones broken in several places. There was an image of a girl, perhaps thirteen, with most her face blown off.[2]

          Search and rescue was pulling people out _in pieces_.

          A shoe. A glove. A head.

          All telepaths.

          And the so-called "Underground," O'Hannlon's outfit, immediately took credit for the attack. Proudly. They gave some big speech about "freedom."

          Murdering and mutilating teachers and children was, to them, "freedom."

          Amanda thought of her dead colleagues. She thought of the grieving telepaths of Geneva. The telepath community of any city was small and tight-knit - everyone knew everyone else. These were their teachers, their parents, their children. Normals didn't give a shit, and Vacit, it seemed, didn't either, whatever so-called condolence speech he gave over Corps news feeds.

          A hundred dead telepaths would be to the community what a hundred _thousand_ dead would be to normals.

          Furious, nauseous, she called a staff meeting. It was after nine in the evening, but all the senior staff already lived in the office, and usually worked till after ten or eleven. Around the long conference table, she finally told them what the assistant director had told her - that he had wanted to help, but he couldn't, because the orders had come from Director Vacit himself. He'd wanted to help her, but he feared for his life if he defied the director and sent reinforcements to KL. She'd been asking for help tracing O'Hannlon for years, ever since she got to KL, but administration had never lifted a finger to help her, though she'd warned them time and time again he was here.

          She could feel the chill make its way through the room as her staff digested what she was saying. It was, in the culture of the Corps, bordering on treason to criticize the director, but this was Malaysia, she knew - they were far from Geneva. No one gave a shit what happened in Malaysia. And what she told them was all true.

          The director - a mundane - had blocked them.

          "Fuck mundanes," someone muttered under their breath. She let it pass.

          "O'Hannlon's here in Malaysia," she told her staff. "He calls himself 'The Monkey King'. He's been running his little circus of death under our noses for years, and laughing at us for our impotence. He's been kidnapping and killing our people - his own people! - for sixty years, and I'm done with him. He's finished. I don't give a rat's ass what Vacit thinks about it. No more telepaths will die on my watch."

          She could feel, for the first time since her arrival, a surge in morale.

          "You heard me," she said. "We all saw the images just now. When I first put on this badge, I swore an oath to serve and defend. I swore an oath to protect my people." She looked into the eyes of the other Psi Cops. "You swore it, too."

          "The Corps is Mother, the Corps is Father," they repeated, a new light and determination shining in their eyes. Others sat quietly crying, thinking of the images. _What hurts one hurts all_ , as they said back in the cadres, and it was as true as ever. Some of those around her table had gone to that school. These weren't just any teachers - they were _their_ teachers.

           "The Corps is Mother and Father," said Amanda, "but not that mundane rat Vacit. He let our children die out there. I don't know what game they're playing up there, but fuck them. This is no game. People died today - our people... our children! - and maybe they'd be alive now if Vacit had given us the money and staff I've been asking for - for two years. I'm done with him."

           She saw the nods and cautious smiles around the table. They were all with her.

           "You know me. I'm no desk job kind of woman. I spent twenty years out in the field, chasing O'Hannlon's henchmen around in circles. I even caught a few. They promoted me up here to get rid of me, I suppose, but it's not going to work. We're going to find O'Hannlon and ice him for good, Geneva or no."

          "At last!"

          "This is for everyone impacted by today's tragedy," she said. "For the teachers. For the children. For _all_ of his victims. For family. For the Corps!"

          The room broke into applause.

          "And since he's operating here in Malaysia," she continued, when the clapping had died down a bit, "we're going to follow the money. And we're going to shut it off."

          _Even if it's coming from Geneva?_ thought her second-hand man, a Punjabi fellow by the name of Johar.

          "I'm going to pretend you didn't just think that," she replied aloud.

 

[1] See _Midnight on the Firing Line_ , _The Fall of Centauri Prime_. "The thermonuclear device used by the terrorists to blow up San Diego..."

[2] This attack happened, and is mentioned in canon in Dark Genesis, p. 139-140:

_"You've seen things. You know things. These people are not your friends, Fiona. They are criminals and killers. They planted a bomb, Fiona, in Geneva. They killed a lot of people._

_"Psi Corps,_ she answered. _We bombed Psi Corps..._

     "Images suddenly burst into her head. A girl of perhaps thirteen years, most of her face gone. An old man, moaning, reaching for something with a hand he no longer had. A cloud of pain, exquisite and complex."

The rogues had to have bombed the school campus if there were children injured and killed in the attack, since children of that age never leave campus, and it's said they bombed a Corps building. Therefore the bomb must have targeted (at least) the Minor Academy building on the campus in Geneva.

Not only does Fiona confess to being directly involved in the bombing in that scene, she also discusses it on page 130:

_"You weren't here. We got the call. If I had waited for you, Psi Corps might have gotten him. (defiance) Besides, I'm a big girl now. Hell, I'm nineteen! How long are you going to try to keep me from doing my part?_

_"You do your part, smartmouth, and don't argue with me. Of all the stupid-_

_"Oh, yeah, I get to do tactical. Build bombs, but never set them off."_

Fiona, yes, is complaining that she only gets to _make_ the bombs that kill other telepaths (including children, as here), but not go and set them off herself, like it would be some proof of her adulthood to do the murdering directly.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This material is adapted from Dark Genesis, p. 127-132.

          Catching O'Hannlon was, of course, harder done than said. Amanda and her office suspected he was operating from the coastal city of Kuantan, but they weren't certain. The office didn't have the resources to do proper intelligence work.

          And there was no field office in Kuantan - the KL office was the only Psi Corps office in the entire country.

          "Any success tracking the money trail, Mr. Johar?" she asked by the end of the week.

          He shook his head. "None whatsoever. I can't do it without the help of the mundane police, and they hate the Corps so much," he said, borrowing an American expression, "they wouldn't piss on me to put out the flames if I was on fire."

          She pursed her lips in frustration. "Then we need another tack."

          There had been no more chatter - O'Hannlon was laying low, as she expected him to do. He would regroup and plan the next attack - or prison break, or kidnapping, or whatever he had in mind. Then in a few months, he would strike again.

          "When I was little, my dad used to take me fishing," she said. "We would use a small fish - crayfish, minnows - as bait to catch a big one. If we're going to catch O'Hannlon, we need to trick him into coming out where we can nab him."

          "What do you have in mind?"

          O'Hannlon, she explained, used to do the terrorist attacks and prison breaks himself, but he was old now, and he sent underlings to do it. When he appeared in public - which was rare - it was usually to grab some child out of school before the Corps got there.

          O'Hannlon had spies across Malaysia, and in other countries - whenever a call came in from a school or hospital, the Corps had to rush to get there before O'Hannlon or his followers got there first. O'Hannlon had comm moles in Psi Corps communications equipment - moles that always seemed to reappear every time the Corps found and removed them. If Amanda's team delayed, they would too often arrive to find the school or hospital staff tied up in the corner, and the child missing - forever. And she had to tell the distressed parents that their son or daughter had been abducted and would likely never be found again.

          Gone. And brainwashed to kill, like his or her captors. O'Hannlon had once been a cult leader. He was good at that shit.

          "We're not going to take the next child," she said. "We'll put a tracking device in his or her clothes, and wait. If O'Hannlon shows up, we'll grab him. If he sends his lackeys, we'll follow them."

          It was a radical idea, she knew. It broke with Corps protocol. It put a child's life in danger. Geneva would never approve.

          To hell with Geneva.

          "They'll see our car," Johar said.

          "We'll use an unmarked car."

          "Wait, we have one of those? We can use an unmarked car? That's not regulation."

          "We're not following regulation. We're catching a terrorist."

          They planned for weeks. If Amanda's suspicions were correct and O'Hannlon was in Kuantan, then he would be most likely to show up in person to "rescue" a child in that vicinity. He was old.

          Amanda's office procured a second-hand groundcar - a beat-up, old brown Cortez with a dent in the door.

          "Does it run?" she asked Johar.

          "Like a charm."

          "I've never seen a worse car in my life."

          "You told me-"

          "It's _perfect_."

          They compiled a database and map of all the schools and hospitals in the area. Though a call could come in from anywhere - parents sometimes called the Corps directly - the call would most likely come from a school or hospital, and O'Hannlon would be more likely to kidnap a child from there than from the child's own home. That wasn't in his playbook.

          "So we put a tracking device on the kid," said Johar. "When O'Hannlon gets there, he'll know we got there first. He probably won't even have to scan anybody, it'll be so obvious."

          "We'll wipe their memories."

          "That's illegal."

          "Oh, and it's worse than murdering and kidnapping children, I suppose?"

          "No, I mean..."

          "You mean what? You mean _what_ , Mr. Johar?"

          He considered. "Nothing. I mean nothing."

          They waited.

          Two weeks later, they got exactly the call they were waiting for - an ethnic Indian boy, twelve years old, had suddenly developed telepathy in a town about forty minutes west of Kuantan. His family had thrown him out, the school administrator explained. They'd called him a demon, and he was in such terrible shape emotionally, he would do nothing but sit in the corner of the school nurse's office, screaming and crying. He wouldn't even eat.

          "Please help him, please," the man begged.

          Off they went: Fresno, Johar, two Psi Cops, and the office's top bloodhound unit, all packed into three groundcars - including the Cortez. For the first time since her "promotion," Amanda was back in the field.

          It felt good.

          The Cortez would park near the school, in line of sight, while the regulation sedans would wait a few blocks away. No one would ever, _ever_ expect Psi Cops in that beat-up Cortez - and if they didn't expect it, they wouldn't see it.

          On they drove, in silence for most of the ride. Amanda didn't mind the silence - it gave her time to think. For two hours she looked out the sedan's tinted windows at the streets of brightly colored Vibralite buildings - every town in Malaysia was made of the same cheap, brightly-colored, indestructible material - and hoped, prayed even, that her plan would work.

          _Come on, O'Hannlon_ , she thought. _Take the bait._


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This material is adapted from Dark Genesis, p. 127-132.

          Amanda waited in the car while Mr. Johar pinned the tracking device inside the boy's clothes. There were only two adults who saw him - a guard and the school nurse, a Muslim woman in a bright headscarf, so it wasn't very hard to erase the memory of his presence. They felt a little woozy, then went back to wondering when the Corps would arrive.

          "It's done," he said through the rolled-down window of the sedan. "Now we wait."

          Johar and his team sat in the unmarked car across from the school, while Amanda, another Psi Cop, and a team of bloodhounds waited several blocks away near the town's police station. Their cars were marked - regulation Tawanaka sedans, black, with a large "psi" emblazoned on the side. Amanda would joke that people ran from those cars faster than from anything - drivers would take their time pulling over for a fire engine and ambulance, sirens blaring, but if a Psi Corps sedan came through, they'd clear the streets like the devil himself was after them. These cars could even chase away the potholes.

         The sedans, as expected, drew uncomfortable stares from passersby. Amanda hoped that by parking near the town's police station, she would offer the townsfolk a meager explanation of sorts for the Corps' presence. They were there on police business. Somehow. As long as no one saw the cars and tipped off O'Hannlon.

          It was a risk they had to take.

          Finally, they got the break they had been waiting for. A girl in her late teens - with light skin and auburn hair - pulled up on a scooter outside the school, and ran inside.

          "JO took the bait," Johar radioed over. "Holy smokes. FT's in the building."

          Amanda's eyes went wide. This was it. This was working.

          "FT," she knew, referred to "Fiona Temple," Jack O'Hannlon's adopted granddaughter. Amanda didn't know the girl's origins, only that O'Hannlon had kidnapped her as a baby and raised her to be his protege. She was a P12 prodigy, born manifested. And she knew more about the operation of his "Underground" than anyone else in his whole outfit - names, addresses, bank accounts... everything.[1] O'Hannlon trusted no one entirely, except her.

          "If she strips the kid, nab her."

          "Yes ma'am."

          Amanda expected her to search the child for tracking devices before taking him, but to her shock, the teenager put the boy on her motorbike and drove off with him through the streets of the town, heading for the open land and the highway to Kuantan. It was anyone's guess what she'd said - or done - to the normals in the building in order to get the child, but she was in and out of there in under a minute.

          "Follow them," Amanda ordered.

          "Already on it."

          The marked cars made sure to stay far enough behind, out of line of sight, even along the open highway. The town gave way to wide fields, hills, and palm plantations. Again, they drove in silence.

          The thrill of being back in the field - back on the hunt - gradually gave way to a sense of uneasiness. They didn't know where the girl was leading them. To O'Hannlon? To a so-called safe-house where they warehoused children before sending them off somewhere else?

          After surviving the field for twenty years, Amanda had seen her share of missions go wrong. People died when missions went wrong. This was the biggest fish of all. Were they walking into a trap?

          Perhaps. Jack O'Hannlon was a ruthless psychopath who had been murdering in cold blood his whole life. It was a game to him. In his youth, he'd been a mercenary in Kamchatka. By 2115, he and his then-associates were running a Neo-Mayan pagan cult deep in the forests of Alaska, scamming hundreds of gullible people out of every dime of their life savings. When they were confronted by a band of armed, angry normals, he and the other cult leaders had escaped out a secret back tunnel, and O'Hannlon had destroyed the temple - and the two hundred normals in it, _his own loyal followers_ \- with sixty kilos of plastique explosive.[2]

          But perhaps O'Hannlon had grown lazy in his old age. More and more, he sent young people to do all the killing and kidnapping, while he stayed home and gave orders.

          They entered the seaside city of Kuantan a safe distance behind the girl, the sedans taking the lead to clear out the traffic. Soon they were driving down narrow streets crammed with low, Vibralite buildings on both sides - cheap, run-down apartments with storefronts in between, on street level. Laundry hung from cords above the street and over balconies. They drove till the sea was in sight - calm, glistening in the late-afternoon sunlight.

          "They've stopped," Johar radioed. "She's parked the motorbike in a lot, and she's taking the kid into a restaurant."

          Amanda's team parked a block from Johar's Cortez, and walked over to the restaurant. The building looked no different from any of the others surrounding it - humble, one-story, and made of Vibralite. It couldn't hold more than fifty people, Amanda guessed, unless there were rooms in the back.

          All the markings on the restaurant were in Chinese. One of the other Psi Cops read the signs to her. "The Monkey King."

          "He's got some nerve. Plain sight, indeed."

          "Open only for dinner. That's strange."

          "Who's inside? Don't scan."

          It was too risky to scan - the high-level telepaths inside the building might feel it, even from across the street. The bloodhounds spread out down the street, and pulled out high-powered binoculars.

          _O'Hannlon's there with the girl and the kid. They're having a fight. There's no one else in sight._

         This was it. One man over ninety years old, a teenage girl, and a twelve-year-old boy. No guards. They'd caught them all unawares.

         "OK, we're going in," Amanda ordered. "Johar, hang back with a cop, four hounds and a regulation sedan. Take up position in case they make a run for it. Everyone else, lock and load."

          Everyone got into position.

          _Game over, you son of a bitch_ , she thought.

 

[1] See Dark Genesis, p. 130:

_"I can't leave you!_

_"Damn straight you can. What did I teach you? Jeez, Fee, I'm over ninety! How much longer did you think I was going to make it, anyway? I can't run anymore, and I can't fight. But you can. Next to me, no one knows as much about things as you. So they can't have you. Too many people count on you. Go!"_

[2] Dark Genesis, p. 23-26:

That incident is described in detail on those pages, but ends with:

     "What was the explosion?" Mercy asked.

     "That would be our temple," Monkey said. "Sixty kilos of plastique."

     "Oh, my God," Mercy said. "Our followers..." She started to cry, and for once she was strong, her tears washing over them all.

     "Not anymore," Monkey said, putting his arm under Blood's and lifting her up. "That game's over. It's time to move on.""

The normals are also presented as motivated to kill the cultists simply because they're telepaths - because Crawford has made his bigoted announcements on TV, because "science has discovered them [these individuals, somehow]" per perhaps because they "used their powers too freely". The announcement is made that telepaths exist, so suddenly the townsfolk, even though they never believed in such things before, all decide "oh, those cultists weren't frauds all along, which we could tolerate - they were telepaths _and_ frauds! Let's get all our guns and shoot them!" (Monkey says that the townsfolk "assumed they were frauds" but didn't really care, and never got in the way of the cult leaders' "good times" - until one day that announcement about telepaths was made, and then everyone got their guns.)

A more reasonable explanation is that this has nothing whatsoever to do with telepathy - the townsfolk are angry about the two hundred people these cult leaders are scamming out of their life savings by pretending to be semi-divine figures. (Normals pull such scams, too.)

Monkey's response is just to kill everyone.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This material is adapted from Dark Genesis, p. 127-132.

          Amanda had barely given the order before Fiona - holding tightly to the boy - burst out the restaurant door and sprinted for her scooter. She reached the bike as Johar and the hounds dove into the car and fired up the engine. Amanda signaled to her team.

          _Now._

          They crashed through the flimsy restaurant door, weapons drawn. The four hounds went first, followed by Amanda and one of her junior cops.

          "POLICE! FREEZE!"

          The room was, indeed, small. An old Irish man, face wrinkled like dried fruit, sat alone at one of the tables, an empty shot glass in his hand. The air smelled of chili, ginger and lemongrass.

          He looked up, and he just smiled.

          "Hello folks," he said, in perfect Anglic. "What can an old man do for you?"

          The hounds moved forward to restrain him, but Amanda signaled them back, and stepped forward.

          Here she was at last, she realized, face to face with the most wanted man in the Corps. The terrorist mastermind himself. The very man who had orchestrated the Geneva school bombing, who had killed dozens of innocent men, women and children, and had proudly taken credit for it.

          She'd wanted to see a monster, but instead she saw an old, weak man. And sitting there alone, he seemed so small, and so utterly _pathetic_.

          "Jack O'Hannlon, you are under arrest. I have warrants on you going back decades, not that I need them to arrest you. It's over, O'Hannlon. You're finished."

          "Jack O'Hannlon," he repeated, pondering. "Now there's a name I haven't heard in a very, very long time. I don't think I much care for it."

          "I don't care what you think. Not at all. Please stand up, slowly." She tilted her head to the other cop, to cuff him. O'Hannlon stood, slowly, and put his hands behind his back. He was still grinning.

          "And wipe that grin off your face, you son of a bitch."

          "Sure thing, sweetie," he said, patronizingly, grinning wider than ever. "But I know something you don't."

          "Oh? And what's that?"

          "Beep, beep, beep."

          Her brow creased in confusion. Then it hit her - this wasn't a restaurant. _It was a bomb._

          He had a munitions factory in the basement. The whole place was packed with C-4 explosive, and wired to blow, even if it took out the whole neighborhood. This was like Alaska all over again, sixty years before. He'd hit the timer when the girl had run out-

          He was still grinning, diabolically. "Bang," he said.

\----------

          Johar's car was barely two hundred yards down the street when the blast went off. The driver hit the breaks - hard - and instinctually, everyone dove for cover. The tinted glass on the left side and back of the car spiderwebbed side to side, but thankfully had been designed not to shatter. Psi Corps sedans were built to take a beating.

          One of the hounds started cursing. Everyone got out of the car and looked back down the street, towards what a moment ago had been a city block. Now it was a charred ruin, with flames and smoke pouring up into the late-afternoon sky.

          Vibralite wasn't entirely indestructible, after all.

          "Fresno," someone muttered.

          "Normals live there! Hundreds of them! Holy hell!"

          Indeed, normals were screaming in every direction. They hardly noticed the Corps personnel. Their neighborhood had literally _exploded_.

          Johar and the others spotted the girl on the ground, on the other side of the street, lying on an embankment under her scooter, with a clearly broken leg. The boy sat next to her, screaming, but apparently not physically harmed.

          The girl was, indeed, a strong P12. It took Johar and another Psi Cop working together to get through her blocks, but after a short fight, they telepathically knocked her out cold. They'd had to use more force than they would have liked to, but she was too high-value a target to leave conscious.

          Sirens blared as emergency vehicles, stuck in gridlock, tried to make their way through the crowded streets of stopped cars and panicked residents.

          Johar and the other cop tied Fiona up and hauled her back to the sedan.

          "What are we doing with the girl?" the cop asked.

          "What do you think? We're gonna do what Fresno wanted! We're gonna scan her guts out before Geneva orders us not to!"

          One of the hounds approached the boy and put him to sleep as gently as he could. He lifted the child's small frame with ease.

          "It's really better if he doesn't remember today," Johar said solemnly, looking at the child's innocent face. "Poor thing. I'm sorry we had to put him through this. He never asked for it."

          "But he's safe now," the hound said.

          "Yeah. He is, at last."

          _At last._ O'Hannlon was dead. His subterranean munitions factory had been destroyed. Fiona Temple was in custody.

          Fresno and her team had given their lives, but not in vain. If Geneva didn't like it, they could kiss his ass.

          The Corps personnel stood for a moment, watching the neighborhood burn.

          "It's over," Johar said. "At last."


End file.
